Booth walkthrough with the artist
Vanderlei Lopes

In English, without translation.
Open to the public.

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CURATORIAL VISION

For ESTE Arte, Almeida & Dale presents a solo by Vanderlei Lopes. The booth features six new works in which Lopes, for the first time, employs aluminum in his sculptures, which evoke flowing liquids, puddles, and everyday objects. With varied finishes, the metal surfaces are sometimes mirror-like—intensifying the illusion of water—sometimes darkened with patina, or painted to resemble ordinary objects and debris, such as cigarette butts, Styrofoam cups, and crumpled paper. In addition to these larger pieces, the presentation includes a piece made entirely of silver—a material echoed in the reflective quality of the aluminum—painted to resemble a sheet of paper bearing a satellite image of an inverted South America. Countering the material’s inherent value and adding contemporary political lens to a staple of Uruguaian art. Created specifically for the fair, the works engage with the site from historical and mythological perspectives, and with the coastal landscape where the fair takes place. Through a play of language and semiotics, Lopes’s sculptures reflect on the nature of the contemporary art object, its systems of circulation, and issues such as climate change, consumption, and Latin American politics and history—tensioning luxury and waste, rarity and ordinariness, beauty and decay.

BIO

Vanderlei Lopes (Brazilian, b. 1973) explores in his sculptural practice the intersections between artistic tradition, representation, and systems of circulation, often addressing the cultural and social processes that shape our perception of objects. His works are marked by an “indexical” quality: ordinary objects and ephemeral situations are cast or imprinted with almost photographic precision, generating frictions with the spaces they inhabit and drawing attention to temporality—oscillating between historical distance and immediate presence. Solo exhibitions include Capela do Morumbi, São Paulo (2017); Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2015); and MAM Rio de Janeiro (2014). He has also participated in the 22nd Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala (2021), the 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre (2009), and notable group shows at MuBE and Sesc 24 de Maio in São Paulo. His works are held in the collections of MAM São Paulo, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, MAC USP, MAR Rio de Janeiro, MAM Rio, Instituto Itaú Cultural, and Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, among others.

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